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2012/03/13

Why I Hate Chrome

Pretend you have a spreadsheet, for example an Excel spreadsheet. You want to do something with it online, because that's what everyone wants to do with stuff.

What's the simplest way? The simplest way is to make a TEXTAREA, and paste it in. If you don't want to make all sorts of subpages for every thing you'd want to put into a TEXTAREA, you make a thing with Javascript and AJAX it up to the server. You only have to reload the page if it works, which is cool. AJAX is cool.

Excel is kinda cool, in a way, in that, if you copy several columns and rows of a spreadsheet and paste it into a non-spreadsheet area, you get newlines for the end of a row and tabs to delimit columns. This is useful, because then you know that, when you have to turn that chunk of spreadsheet into a data structure, you can split on newline to get every row, and then you can split on tab to get every column.

That splitting is something I usually prefer to do on the server side. I write my server-side in Perl, and it can very easily split on newlines and tabs. I write my client-side with the help of jQuery, which I do not believe to be at fault.

I wish to send it up using jQuery's post, sending a JSON object. I put the TEXTAREA's value as a value in an object, and send it to the server. But, as early as I can tell in the process, Chrome's Javascript ignores the tabs, so if you had data that looked like AtabBtabCnewline1tab2tab3, it will pass it up as ABCnewline123.

I'm using Chrome 18.0.1025.56 beta-m right now. I also use Firefox. I mostly use Firefox for Facebook, because I can't load some Facebook games with Chrome. I don't normally mind that: it reminds me not to play around when I'm busy doing something else. Here, Firefox proved to me that Chrome is the problem, not my code. And I'm saved some, because my users for this tool use Firefox.